Without You, I'm not Me
by karkashan
Summary: Ninety days he's been sober, ever since his nine month drinking binge. Gods, he missed her. An although he knows he shouldn't, he rests his head, closes his eyes, and remembers her. Larsa x Penelo older Larsa


_Without You, I'm not Me_

_I got just one small problem here in Little Rock: Without you, baby I'm not me. - Collin Raye, singing Little Rock._

Larsa Ferrinas Solidor, the 25 year old Emperor of Archadia, glanced at the small calendar on the corner of his desk. Rubbing his head, he counted back the days, muttering to himself about the bossy nature of Judges.

"It's been ninety days, ninety excruciating days, since I last drank. I just wish Gabranth would stop bothering me so much about not drinking any more." He intertwined his fingers, clasping his hands together, before resting his chin on them. His eyes grew solemn as he stared off into space, "I've learned to cope with what happened, Gabranth, without alcohol this time."

Larsa let his arms fall limply to the desk, "I just...." he rested his head on his arms, his eyes growing misty (again, dammit), and his body shivered slightly as he continued to talk to himself, "I just wish it wasn't so damn _hard_..., to live without her..."

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_Five years ago – Imperial Palace, Archadia_

"Penelo, how was your day today?" Larsa asked sweetly, before kissing both her and their two month old son on the lips and the forehead, respectively.

Penelo grumbled underneath her breath, and Larsa quirked an eyebrow as he sat down and asked, "I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that. What did you say?"

The love of his life gave him a tired glare and said, "If I had known it would be this tiring, I would have seen to it that we were the first married couple in history to remain virgins the rest of our lives."

Larsa smirked at her, "You don't mean that." The way he said it, it wasn't even closely resembling a question, but Penelo answered anyway.

She sighed tiredly, "No, I don't mean that." She smiled softly as she stroked her baby boy's cheek, which caused the little one to make a baby's equivalent of a smile and make small cooing noises in her direction. "I will never regret bringing such a cute little man into this world, especially such a gentlemanly one at that."

Larsa undid his wife's braid and ran his hand through her hair gently, smiling at the two most important people in his world. "So he's a fairly well behaved baby, is he? As expected of a child of House Solidor."

Penelo tried to stop the snort of laughter that escaped her, she truly did, but with the way that Larsa said it she just couldn't help herself. "You don't have any sort of Ego at all, do you?" she said in an overly obvious sarcastic tone.

Larsa smiled and wrapped an arm around Penelo's shoulders, "Would you like me to watch over our son while you catch up on your sleep?"

Penelo's answering smile was radiant.

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_One year ago, Skies above Archadia_

Yet another airship exploded in the sky above the capital of Archadia. A woman screamed as she saw a giant partially invisible shape move to crush yet another building that had stood for decades as a testament to the lasting quality of Archadian construction.

"Penelo!" Larsa screamed as he ran through the flagship of the seventh Arcadian fleet, the _Justification._ The ship had been attacked out of nowhere by an unseen force, and while they had managed to just barely set the ship on a course to where it would not crash into the city, that didn't mean that they needed to stick around and crash with it.

"Penelo!" he screamed again, his voice starting to become hoarse. He rushed down the next hallway he came across, even going so far as to simply bash a door open in an attempt to find his wife, as Gabranth had already fled with his now four year old son.

The door gave way on the first attempt to ram it down, and it was then that Larsa realized that the door was actually one that led to a sort of balcony. And as his vision cleared up from being almost blinded by the bright sunlight in contrast to the dark corridors he had just left behind, Larsa came face to face with something directly from the darkest sort of Nightmares.

A Giant Skeleton like creature with six arms, and a gigantic skeletal snake like tail serving as its lower body, stared directly at the young Emperor of Archadia. It wore a circlet made of a glossy, ebony colored, stone, with three rubies the size of a tall person inlaid in three of the spikes that formed the front of the fiendish 'crown'.

And as Larsa looked on helplessly, he watched as his wife of five years was consumed by a dark vortex that one of the four Nightmares, the Fiend known as Lich, used to destroy the rest of the airship.

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_Present - Imperial Palace, Archadia_

"Papa?" said a little boy of five years timidly. "Are you sleeping?"

Larsa quickly dried his face and stood up, walking around his desk and picking his son up, giving him a warm hug. "No, Cidolfus, I wasn't sleeping. I was just remembering some things that I probably shouldn't."

The little Cid pouted at his father, "Judge Gabanth said that Papa shouldn't think of stuff about last year. He says that drinkin' adult prune juice messes Papa's head up and that's why he kept on getting those really bad headaches every day ever since Mommy disappeared."

Larsa smiled sadly at his son, "Don't worry, little Cid, Papa doesn't drink adult prune juice any more."

His son nodded sagely at him and said in the most serious sounding voice a five year old could muster, "That's good to hear, Papa."

Larsa quirked an eyebrow and grinned at his son, "Oh? What's this? My little Cid is acting so serious? Perhaps I should tickle him in order to remedy that?"

And that's how Gabranth knew that his emperor was finally beginning to cope with the loss of his wife. For as he went to deliver one last report to the young emperor, he instead stopped in the doorway and smiled at the scene of a little five year old boy trying without any success whatsoever to stop giggling as his father playfully tickled him.

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FIN

....or is it?

(Playlist- Collin Raye- Little Rock) (A little Country never hurt nobody)

AN: Okay, that was rather sad there near the end.....Okay then readers, tell me what should I do, should I make another one-shot or chapter so that Larsa gets a happier ending, or is this fine as is? I'm really not sure, but I've found that I don't really like to leave Larsa so alone like that. (That's probably why I became a Larsa x Penelo fan to begin with.)


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